Careless People

Sarah Wynn-Williams · 2025

Thesis

Facebook's leaders, in the account of a former senior policy executive, wielded power over politics and societies around the world with little regard for its consequences, pursuing growth into China, ignoring warnings about violence in Myanmar and helping shape elections, while treating the people around them with the same carelessness.

The main ideas

A company with global reach can affect politics and human rights in countries its leaders barely understand.
Facebook, the author reports, spent years trying to enter China, including building censorship tools for its government.
In Myanmar, the company failed to moderate hate speech that fed violence against the Rohingya.
Facebook staff worked closely with the Trump campaign in 2016, while its chief executive publicly denied the company had influenced the election.
The company offered advertisers ways to reach teenagers at moments of emotional vulnerability.
The culture at the top, in her account, was insular, entitled and indifferent to its effects on others.

Careless people

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat who had worked at the United Nations and her country's embassy in Washington, joined Facebook in 2011 and became its director of global public policy. She was fired in 2017. Her memoir, published in 2025, takes its title from the passage at the end of The Great Gatsby in which the narrator judges Tom and Daisy Buchanan, wealthy people who smash things and let others clean up.

She joined, she writes, believing Facebook could do enormous good. The book traces her disillusionment as she watched its leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan, exercise power over governments and populations with little interest in the consequences.

Her portrait of them is personal. She describes Zuckerberg refusing to meet New Zealand's prime minister, John Key, even when Key was standing in front of him, and makes allegations of inappropriate behavior by Sandberg and Kaplan, which Meta has called false.

Implication: judge the power of a technology company not only by its products but by the judgment and accountability of the few people who control it.

China

Wynn-Williams reports that Facebook spent years trying to enter China, where it was blocked, including a 2014 plan called Project Aldrin. In her account, the company was prepared to build custom censorship tools for the Chinese government as the price of access.

In April 2025 she testified before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Josh Hawley that Meta had worked hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test these tools. A Senate investigations subcommittee later said internal Meta documents corroborated her account. Meta called her testimony divorced from reality and said it does not operate its services in China.

The mechanism, as she describes it, is that a company driven by growth will treat the values it professes at home as negotiable abroad when a large market is at stake.

Implication: when a company says it stands for openness or free expression, check what it was willing to trade away to enter markets that reject those values.

Myanmar

The book's gravest charge concerns Myanmar, where Facebook became for many people the internet itself. Wynn-Williams argues that the company failed to moderate anti-Rohingya hate speech, had very few moderators who could read Burmese, and that its leadership showed little concern as the platform spread incitement before the violence that the United Nations later called genocidal.

United Nations investigators said in 2018 that Facebook played a role in spreading hate in Myanmar, and the company has since acknowledged that it did not do enough.

The mechanism is that a company that expands into a country faster than it builds the knowledge and staff to understand it cannot see the harm its product is doing there.

Implication: a platform's responsibility grows with its reach. Ask whether a company has the people and understanding to manage the effects of its product in every place it operates.

Elections and teenagers

Wynn-Williams reports that during the 2016 American election, Facebook staff were embedded with the Trump campaign's digital operation, helping it use the platform, while Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the idea that Facebook had influenced the result.

She also describes a leaked 2017 document showing that Facebook offered advertisers the ability to reach users aged 13 to 17 at moments of emotional vulnerability, for example targeting beauty products at a girl who had just deleted a selfie, or weight-loss products at teenagers anxious about their bodies. In her Senate testimony she said the company could identify when teenagers felt worthless or like a failure and share that with advertisers.

The mechanism is that an advertising business optimizes for what sells, and emotional vulnerability sells. Without limits imposed from outside, the incentive is to exploit it.

Implication: assume that a free product funded by advertising is measuring its users' weaknesses, and judge its claims of care accordingly.

The response

Meta's reaction became part of the story. On the day the book was published, the company sought arbitration, arguing that Wynn-Williams had broken a non-disparagement agreement in her severance. An emergency arbitrator ordered her to stop promoting the book. Her publisher, which was not bound by the agreement, kept selling it, and it sold about 60,000 copies in its first week and became a New York Times bestseller.

Meta called the book a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims and false accusations about its executives, and said a 2017 investigation had found her harassment complaint against Kaplan misleading and unfounded.

Implication: when a company works to silence a critic rather than rebut her, the effort can draw more attention to the claims than they would otherwise receive.

Limits

It is one person's account, by a dismissed employee. Meta disputes its claims, and its personal anecdotes about executives cannot be independently checked.
Former colleagues have challenged its accuracy and emphasis. Katie Harbath, who worked in Facebook's policy team, alleged inaccuracies and exaggerations, and other former staff argued that the book plays down the author's own role, including warnings about Myanmar that civil society groups gave her in 2012.
Some of its material had been reported before. Facebook's role in Myanmar and its ambitions in China were widely covered before publication, so the book's contribution is mainly an insider's view of how leaders responded.

Empire of AI — another account of a technology company accumulating power with little accountability.
The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison — an earlier portrait of a technology founder's unchecked power over his company.